Import iMovie Video Projects to External Drive

I’ve been using iMovie at work to do some video post production and had a problem when I ran out of space and wanted to import footage to an external drive. Thanks to Apple’s lacking documentation (or my inability to find the details), this wasn’t as straightforward as I would have hoped.

In iMovie, File > Import menu gives you a ‘Save To’ drop down menu. To get your drive to show up here, there are two criteria you need to meet:

The external drive must be fast enough. My 2TB external drive wasn’t available when connected via USB 2.0, but became available when connected via FireWire.

The external drive has to be formatted as Mac OS Extended or Mac OS Extended Journaled.

Once the drive was properly formatted and connected via FireWire, iMovie saw it as an option for import.